by Sigal Samuel
And Samara? As the minutes trickled by, he told himself he had done his part. He had taught Alex the basics of the Tree of Life. The boy didn’t think he’d be able to talk her down, but surely, in time, he would. He was a bright kid. And if Samara had chosen to write to him, she must have known he would eventually be the one to help her.
As for Glassman, he’d already started down this path. To reverse course now would require great energy. And he didn’t have any energy left at all.
He tilted the bottle and the pills spilled out onto his palm.
In the darkness of the bedroom, they shone like stars.
Because he wanted to see their brighter counterparts one last time, he went over to the window, but the sky was gray and full of mist. Even that he would not be granted. Even that.
So.
He raised his palm, opened his mouth, tilted his head backward, and—
The pills rolled off his palm and clattered to the floor, skittering in all directions. He blinked. There in the branches of Katz’s tin can tree, a sign no amount of mist could obscure. A bright yellow raincoat.
For one beautiful second, he believed that the girl in the yellow raincoat was his wife. Not the woman wasting away behind him, but his wife as a girl, the girl she’d been on the day they reunited after the war. In the moments right before the terrible mistake. But it wasn’t his wife. It was Samara.
What was she doing there? In Alex’s raincoat. And alone. Through the window of the Meyer house he saw that Alex, Lev, and the blond-haired girl had all fallen asleep in the same room, their tired child limbs splayed out across two couches and a chair. The girl they were all there to keep an eye on had apparently snuck past them.
Samara was halfway up the tree. She was reaching for a branch that did not look strong enough to support her weight. Glassman’s body flooded with pity. Not for the girl. For itself. Its tired limbs, its creaking bones. Its envelope of loose skin, stamped with secrets and age spots and numbers, a worn letter someone had forgotten to send. To be sent at last was all he wanted now. But in that instant, he knew he would not be able to leave the world that night. He would not get to depart at the same time as his wife. Because, although it was too late to save her, to pry her out of the shell of silence she was stuck in, it was not too late to save Samara.
Glassman called her name from his doorway, but his voice was snatched by the wind. Bareheaded, a light drizzle pricking the skin of his face and hands, he wrapped his arms around himself and ventured deeper into the night. Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!
Trudging down the street, wiping mist from his eyes, he made out Katz’s old oak tree shining in the distance. Its tin cans jangled crazily. He sliced toward it until the figure in the yellow raincoat stood out in sharp relief. He tried again: “Samara!”
Nothing but wind and water rushed back at him.
He came nearer still, shielding his eyes. The girl was perched in the middle branches of the tree, upper body hunched over, hair plastered to her forehead, hands blue with cold. She was deliberately forcing her body to suffer. Ayin. Divestment of the physical. Ego-annihilation.
What could he do, what could he possibly say in the face of such resolve?
In that moment, the mistake that had haunted him for months returned to him in full force. And, though it cost him everything to finally give it voice, he knew it was the only way.
“Samara,” he began, a few feet from the base of the tree. “It is very cold. Are you not cold up there, all by yourself? You are not warm enough—a thin raincoat like that! Just such a raincoat my Chayaleh wore, long, long ago. Soon after the war. If you will permit me, I will tell you the story.”
The girl said nothing, so he went on.
“It was a night like this one. Cold. Very cold. The air that night was ice and also fire, air so cold it burned. She said I should meet her in the park, you see? Or, well, her cousin Reuben says she says I should meet her in the park. Lower . . . East . . . Side, he says, slowly, slowly, into the telephone. As if I am a simpleton. But it doesn’t matter, it’s not important, the important thing is she is alive and I am going to see her, tonight, tonight!
“So, good, I go to the park. I sit by the fountain. I wait. And, let me tell you, the wind is freezing! The skin on my hands, freezing! My face and my hair and my eyeballs and my tuches, freezing, freezing! But, let me also tell you, I do not even think of the cold. Do not even remember I have a body. All I can think of is her. Will she cry? Will I hold her? Will she give me this small gift—her crying, me holding her, not the other way around? Will we talk all night long until our tongues fall out? So much to say to each other! About every brother and sister and mother and father and cousin and friend, so many questions to answer. For example: Left or right? For example: Dead or alive? For example: How? And I think it will take us a very long time, the rest of our lives maybe, to answer all of these questions.
“It is cold. The stars are going down. Almost a whole night I am waiting for her in this park. I think: She is testing me. I think: This silence is a test. But I like tests, I am good at tests. So easy she thinks it is to push me away? Ha! I will show her.
“A whole night I have waited, and now it is dawn. The first streak of light appears in the sky and I think, for the first time, maybe she is not coming. Then I turn around—and look, there, look! There she is! I open my mouth to call to her—and then I see it. And my mouth falls shut.
“She is wearing a yellow raincoat.
“A yellow raincoat.
“Yellow.”
Glassman paused, waiting to see if the girl would give him some kind of response. She gave nothing—not even a twitch. He inched closer.
“This yellow raincoat is a problem. This yellow raincoat is a mathematical puzzle. She stands still so I can examine it. She does not move. And she does not speak.
“This much I understand right away: The problem is not with the raincoatness of the raincoat. The problem is with the yellowness of the yellow. Because this yellow, this bright shining happy beautiful yellow—ah, what a color! It is hard to believe such a color could exist in the same world as. In the same world where. Not hard. Impossible.
“Once I understand this, the next steps of the proof fall into my head, one after the other.
“The color is a statement.
“The statement is: Life is pretty.
“To wear the color means: I believe the statement is true.
“But if this is so, then there is a problem. The problem is: Life is not pretty. I know this. She knows this. How do I know that she knows this? Because all the answers are already in her eyes. Left. Dead. Birkenau.
“The yellow raincoat is a contradiction. She is asking me to embrace a contradiction.
“I open my mouth—
“Again my mouth falls shut.
“Suddenly I remember a story I read in the newspaper. About the thousands of Jewish musicians sent to die in the camps. In some places, there were multiple orchestras, each with dozens of musicians. The Nazis, may their names be erased, forced them to play while their fellow prisoners marched to the gas chambers and the ovens. And in one of the camps there was a very famous composer. The Nazis ordered this man to compose a score. This man considered his options. What could he do? Refuse? Cry? Scream NO at the top of his lungs? His life was anyways going to end by their hands. A score they wanted from him now? So. Very nice. He would compose a score. But, ah, what a score this man composed!
“The score called for one hundred musicians. It called for one hundred instruments. And it ordered that the one hundred musicians should play the one hundred instruments closed. The lid of the piano closed. The violins inside their cases, closed. And so, in front of the whole camp, in front of the burning eyes of the Nazis, the entire orchestra played their instruments, but silently, silently. This silence was their protest, their last great NO.
“And now, now I am looking at Chayaleh in this yellow raincoat, and I am thinking to myself: This raincoat
is the same idea. This raincoat is a great big NO to life. Because, you know, life has rules. Rules such as, life can be pretty or not pretty, but it cannot both be pretty and not pretty at the same time. She knows this. She has a better kop for mathematics than even me, and I know she knows this. And so I know that what she is saying to me, when she comes to me wearing this contradiction, is: NO to all the rules. NO to life.
“I open my mouth—
“Again my mouth falls shut. What can I say? What can she say? I realize that if I accept her strange world of yellow raincoats, nothing at all can be said. To say ‘sky’ would be a lie. To say ‘tree’ would be a lie. The yellow raincoat is revealing a world where nothing can be spoken.”
The light drizzle was not so light anymore; it was deepening to a heavy downpour. Samara lifted her face to let the rain needle her skin. He plunged on, his voice rising.
“Still, in mathematics one must be empirical. I decide I will put the theorem to the test. I will open my mouth and speak the simplest statements, the truest statements I know.
“I try: My name is Chaim Glassman. (The words will not come out.)
“I try: I love you. (The words will not come out.)
“I try: Hello. (The word will not come out.)
“Now I hear the sound of my own heart beating. It is the yellow raincoat that reveals this sound to me. The yellow raincoat tells me that, for its sake, I must forget what I know. I know, for example, that the heart does not contain a finite number of words. That silence is not better than speech. The yellow raincoat tells me to forget this. To make a life of silence possible between my Chayaleh and me, to give it a reason and a history and a meaning that will make it easier for us to bear, I must begin to believe new things.
“The yellow raincoat is a contradiction, and also a contract. The terms are clear: What we cannot speak of, we must pass over in silence. Therefore, life must be passed over in silence.
“The sky is full of light now. In this light, she opens her arms and I embrace her.
“The next steps happen so easily, so quickly, they are like dance steps learned in advance.
“She bends down and holds my ankle and kisses it. I bend down and hold her ankle and kiss it. She gives me a kiss, a small kiss, right in the corner of my mouth. I give her a kiss, a small kiss, right in the corner of her mouth. She presses a finger to my lips. I press a finger to hers. Sha, she tells me without words. Quiet, be quiet, listen.
“I listen. The silence is closing all around us. On the air there is a smell like paper burning. We stand with our fingers on each other’s lips and wait. Somewhere, she knows, her brother is watching. He will see her this way and understand.”
Glassman paused. Rain was slashing down like knives, wind tearing at the branches. And the girl was still statuesque, clinging to her cold patch of sky. Her behavior bore all the hallmarks of Ayin, yet the set of her muscles, the tiny ropes of misery moving beneath her face, made plain that she didn’t want this—not anymore. Still, she did not, perhaps could not, move.
A bolt of lightning exploded in the sky.
Thunder shook the air and the cans howled their pain. A phrase flashed across his brain: You sulphurous and thought-executing fires, vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts, singe my white head!
His eyes darted from the shivering girl in the branches to the flickering tin cans, and a tremor of fear ran through him. He needed to get her down from there fast, before it was too late—and yet she had to come down of her own volition or else this would all be useless.
“Samara!” he called up, neck craning, voice straining. “Do you see? Do you see what I am telling you? I thought—I thought I understood the sign—but what if I was wrong? What if,” he cried, “the yellow raincoat was not a great big NO to life? What if what she was trying to say to me was YES? What if she saw, all those years ago, something it took me decades to understand: that the world is not pretty, but human beings need to try to make it so. Not by escaping into some higher world, not by seeking some invisible sign up in the sky—but by seeking it here, here on the earth, here in the people around you—”
Thunder buried his voice again, and again he raised it.
“But that was not how I chose to read the sign. A wiser man might have read it that way, but I—I was not wise. I wanted what was comfortable, and this—this silence—this was comfortable. Because even though it was not an easy way to live, there were rules, there was a clear path to follow. You are making the same mistake, Samara!”
Had she just turned her head slightly toward him?
“You think, because you are sitting in a tree and it is raining and you have not eaten and you have not slept, that you are uncomfortable? You are following a clear path, and that is comfortable!” Through the downpour, he thought he saw her jaw tighten. “You think, now that you have been dragged up this path, you have no choice but to stay there? You have a choice! You can still fight back! But,” he screamed, “not for long! Because, believe me, the longer you stay this way, the more strength you give it and the more you will be stuck. And soon you will wake up like me, you will find you really do have almost no choice left at all.” Drawing a painful breath, he boomed, “So fight this, Samara. Fight this now!”
Samara’s eyes flicked down to meet his. Another crack of thunder burst directly above her. The tree swayed wildly and the blood drained from her face.
“Come down now, Samara. It is not so far to fall. And I will be here to catch you. It will be like flying, yes? So. Come on now. Fly!”
And in one jagged motion, he thrust out his hand—
She leaped from her branch—
She flew—
A ball of fire hit the tree.
The force of the blow—lightning striking age-old oak—pushed her into his arms and threw him off his feet, so that in the end it was earth that caught them both, holding them together in a wet, tangled heap. They gasped for breath. They gaped upward. A horrible creaking filled their ears. And then they watched as the tree split down the middle, branches splintering on either side, and hundreds of tin cans spilled, clanging, to the ground. The cans groaned as they rolled out over the lawn, onto the sidewalk, and down the street, where they were carried away by a surge of rainwater, their rusty complaint fading into the night.
Alex was not awake. But he was not fully asleep, either. He could feel the first rays of dawn warming his closed eyelids. He was conscious, too, of the vague ache in his back, the crick in his neck. He’d been sleeping at a right angle all night, and his limbs were very much aware of that fact. The muscles at the edges of his eyes—they, too, were slowly becoming aware of something. Of someone.
There was a presence hovering above him. Blocking the light filtering in from the window and casting a shadow on his frame. His mind took stock of that shadow’s dimensions. Its height. Its slimness. Its silence. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew who it was.
Samara stood in a beam of light. Her hair was soaking, her clothes dripping. Her face was pale. But her lips curved upward in a wan smile. She brought a finger to them. For a second he thought she was telling him not to speak, because they had always communicated best in code. But she tilted her head slightly to where Lev and Jenny were still asleep on their respective couches, and he realized she didn’t want to wake them. He gave a minuscule nod.
A ray of pain shot up his neck. Here he was, doing it again. Looking up at her, looking up to her, searching for a sign. He’d been doing this all his life—craning his neck skyward, assuming meaning would rain down on him from the stars. But if Samara’s letters had taught him anything, it was that messages from the stars were apt to be misinterpreted.
With this realization, something in the air shifted, swayed. The old architecture of their relationship was crumbling, making way for a new order to be established in its place. And so, before the whole structure collapsed around their ears, he took a moment to savor it.
The silence between them was cold and bright and elegant. It h
ad a glassy, abstract beauty, like the beauty of pure math. It sparkled in the morning light and he admired it. And then he stood up, and the glass splintered, sliding down.
The two of them stood eye to eye. Samara, whose face he had once invested with divinity, flashed him a shy smile. Not the smile of a false goddess. The smile of a new friend.
And so, in a whisper, he greeted her. “Hello.”
The word landed on his eardrum with the softness of a feather. Its weight was modest, but it was there, with a mass and a density and a volume all its own. Gone were the elegance and abstractness of silence. That “hello” was perhaps less pure. But he found, to his surprise, it was more beautiful.
The first streaks of dawn slanted into the house as Glassman climbed the stairs. He shivered as he went, his clothes wet, his skin cold. He was exhausted but also strangely exhilarated. On the landing, he peered into the bedroom and saw, through the window opposite, a sky glazed with pink and purple, orange and gold. He looked over at his wife in bed. Her skin was gray.
He opened his mouth—
His mouth fell shut.
He stood in the doorframe for a long time.
By the time he made his way over to her side, her face was bathed in light. He extended a finger and traced her last expression—the corners of her lips, their upward tilt—his heart swelling with gratitude for this impossible gift: a final smile, a closing parenthesis.
He sat down beside her.
He pressed his ear to her chest.
He heard nothing.
No, not nothing. A metallic lub-dub, lub-dub seemed to fly up through his wife’s heart and out her chest and into the air, falling upon his ears with shocking clarity. His eyes widened. His breath caught. He lifted his head to look into her face and realized that the sound he was hearing was not a lub-dub but a thud-thud, a rhythmic thwacking coming from outside his bedroom, outside his house.
He left his place at his wife’s side. From the window he saw Katz standing on his front lawn with an ax in his hands and a smile on his face. He was crouched over the remains of his weather-beaten tree—and cutting away at it while singing a cheerful tune.
